


ringing joyful and triumphant

by openended



Series: don't threaten me with a good time (victoria ryder) [5]
Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: (almost naked cuddling), Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, Fluff, Jaal POV, Lazy Mornings, Morning Cuddles, Multi, Naked Cuddling, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 08:41:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10658976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: Jaal's always amazed at how much the AI sounds like a real individual. There's a smirk to SAM's words, an undertone ofyou do not have time for sex this morning, Pathfinder.Or, the one with sleepy morning kisses, SAM cockblocking, far too many parenthetical asides (I’m sorry), and a kleptomaniac pyjak, all from Jaal’s POV. Spoilers for theTempestside quest “The Visitor,” but nothing else.





	ringing joyful and triumphant

**Author's Note:**

> [also on tumblr](http://dearophelia.tumblr.com/post/159696102132/ringing-joyful-and-triumphant-victorialiamjaal)

Jaal wakes to a presence at his back and a slight weight on his hip. He tenses, and his fingers twitch toward where he would keep his gun beside him, but just before he can reach for what isn't there, he takes a breath.  

Apple. With a hint of lemon. 

(Or, what the humans have told him is apple and lemon. He's yet to see or smell either for himself. It smells nice _. She_  smells nice.) 

Ryder.  

( _Victoria_ , she told him many nights ago _. You can call me by my first name,_  she said with a smile.  

He wants to, but there's something about it - something at once ethereal and powerful - that sounds almost like a prayer _. Ryder_  feels better for most circumstances.) 

He opens his eyes, and Ryder's quarters come into view. The stars outside, the desk covered in tablets - angaran medical textbooks, she's trying to absorb years' worth of study in mere days, all for him -  the couches. The hamster squeaks at him. 

He looks down, and sees her bare leg hooked over his hip, blue paint on her toes. Her delicate fingers brush across his shoulder and, with a content, sleepy noise, she slides her arm over his chest. Smiling to himself, he laces his fingers through hers - such soft hands for someone whose weapons are scalpels and guns. He feels her press her lips to his shoulder, and his smile widens.

She's small, hardly comes up to his shoulder, but she's wrapped herself around him so thoroughly, holding him just as well as he holds her. He sighs happily; she's warm, and stretched out almost naked beside him.

Another hand slides over his waist, darker than hers, more calloused. With his other hand, Jaal links his fingers with Liam's, and gives both of them a gentle squeeze.

Liam, still half-asleep, manages a noise that sounds something like _good morning_ , and squeezes his hand in return.

"Morning," Ryder murmurs, rubbing her foot lightly against Jaal's leg. Her fingertips dance over his collarbone and she draws him a little closer.

Jaal turns over in their arms and kisses her softly - a quiet morning greeting. She returns the kiss with a smile against his lips, and presses her forehead to his for a small moment; she then twists over her shoulder to greet Liam good morning. Jaal leans over her - and smiles to himself at the way she settles between them with a happy, calm, peaceful expression on her face - and kisses Liam. He brushes the back of his fingers across the other man's cheek; Liam sleepily nuzzles his hand, and Jaal traces a finger down the slope of Liam's nose.

They're dating. Of a sort. Ryder and Liam explained human dating to him, and it seems to him that they both are, and aren't, dating.

("Schrödinger's dinner and a movie," Ryder said with a laugh. And then had to explain her limited knowledge of quantum theory to the both of them.)

They're spending time together, learning about each other, learning how to be around each other, learning how to  _be_  together. But they aren't going out to dinner on the Nexus, or for a walk along Aya's markets, or even sitting atop a Prodromos building at night, when all the lights have dimmed, watching the stars.   

She's the Pathfinder. It's hard - impossible - for her to walk five steps without someone wanting her time or calling out to her. However true it may be,  _Pathfinder Ryder is sleeping with two of her crew, and one of them is the angara_ isn't a rumor they want: she's already under so much scrutiny, already has a tense enough relationship with Tann and Addison, and darkly derisive comments about  _diplomacy_  will not help matters.  

So instead they spend time like this, tangled together in her bed, or on the couch - hers, or the old, heavy one Liam brought all the way from another galaxy - even planetside, watching each other's backs as they all charge into a kett stronghold.

(And perhaps they're learning the most afterward - when Ryder patches them up in the Nomad, or when they camp for the night. Her gentle, confident hands have saved his life more than once, and he fondly recalls Ryder teaching him to drive by shouting "No, your other left!" at him while she stabilized Liam's shattered leg on the way back to the Tempest.

Jaal thinks he fell in love with them when Ryder sat down on the sand, laughing so hard she was crying, completely tangled in the tent canvas, as Liam - barely able to stand upright for his own laughter - tried to untwist the fabric, and somehow made it _worse_.

"How do you not know how to pitch a tent?" Liam asked later, the tent finally erected, while he poked at their ration packets heating up in the fire.

"I'm a doctor," she said, emptying her boot of the day's sand. "Tents aren't an occupational requirement."

"Given your current career path," Jaal observed, "perhaps they should be."

She stuck her tongue out at him.)

Ryder turns onto her stomach, rests her chin on her folded hands, and looks to the stars outside. She's not one to fall asleep again once awake - unlike Liam, who requires two alarms and a good shove to stay awake, and who is already dozing again - though she enjoys hovering in the hazy area between sleep and wakefulness.

Jaal draws his fingers down her spine, tracing the clean, tattooed lines of the snake as it curls around its rod. His fingers catch against Liam's, his arm slung around Ryder's waist even in sleep, and Jaal briefly curls his hand around his before curving around the snake's tail above her underwear. His path ends just below Liam's hand - no more tattoo, no more bare skin - and he rests his hand half atop Liam's, letting his smallest finger lie on the strip of skin above her blue Initiative-issued underwear. Ryder settles into the mattress with a quiet sigh and turns her head, resting her cheek on her hands. She blinks lazily at him and smiles.

Her hair falls forward, bright sunny orange covering deep, brilliant green eyes. Jaal pushes it out of the way, brushing the backs of his fingers across her cheekbone. She catches his hand and holds him to her, turning into their touch to kiss his palm.

Jaal leans in and gently captures her lips. She returns the kiss, slow and languid, and turns over - slowly, carefully, so that she hardly moves Liam at all. She breaks the kiss with a soft smile, and the adoration in her eyes makes him a little weak. Jaal lightly presses his forehead against hers, and then shifts down the bed to rest his head on her flat stomach. With soft, feather-light touches, she trails her fingers down his neck to his shoulder, to his collarbone, and then lets her hand drop by her side.

Jaal presses a kiss to her stomach, earning him a giggle. He smiles, and does it again, eliciting another giggle.

"Some of us are trying to sleep," Liam says, muffled.

Jaal's on the verge of apologizing when Ryder turns, intertwining her legs with Liam's. "Some of us should stop that," she whispers, and kisses his cheek as she slides her palm over the muscular expanse of his back.

Lightning fast, Liam flips them. Ryder squeaks in surprise as Liam rolls her under him and braces himself above her.

"You," Liam says, dipping down to kiss her nose, "are impossible."

She smiles up at him, and then at Jaal. "A girl's just trying to get some attention in the morning." She drops the smile, and tries to school her features into innocence.

She fails. Utterly.

Jaal smooths out her hair and trails his fingers down to her hip. "If attention is what you want," he promises, voice far lower than usual. He strokes his fingertips across her bare skin, and Ryder's breath hitches as he brushes his thumb across her hip bone.

"Yeah," Liam says, pressing tiny kisses to her neck. "We can do that."

Jaal dips his thumb below the band of her panties. She gasps, pushing her hips into his hands.

"Pathfinder."

Dropping flat to her back, Ryder groans loudly and pulls the pillow out from under her head. Jaal ducks just in time to avoid the pillow as she throws it toward the SAM console on her desk. She misses the console by a significant distance, and instead knocks over a plastic Blasto figurine. Liam buries his face in her shoulder, laughing.

After a moment of silence - which sounds to Jaal like the slightly-irritated patience of a parent whose child will not get out of bed - SAM tries again. "Pathfinder, we will arrive at Kadara in one hour. I would recommend rising now, so that you have ample time for yoga and breakfast."

Jaal's always amazed at how much the AI sounds like a real individual. There's a smirk to SAM's words, an undertone of _you do not have time for sex this morning, Pathfinder_.

"No," she mutters to herself. But she takes a deep breath and he watches her visibly count to ten before she opens her eyes, resigned to the fact that the morning - and anything she may have hoped for it - is over.

"Thanks, SAM," she says, though her voice is more full of frustration and mild contempt than gratitude. She sits up, letting their hands fall away from her, and tucks her feet underneath her. "On hold until tonight?" she asks them as they sit up beside her.

Jaal looks at Liam with a smile, and then nods.

"On hold until tonight," he agrees.

"Tonight," Liam says.

At least she's scheduled Drack and Vetra to accompany her to Kadara Port. Though Jaal would never let his thoughts distract him from a mission, and though he never seems to find anything to suitably occupy his mind and hands while he's on the ship and she's planetside, he's discovered that staring at her backside - especially after interrupted mornings like this - does…things to him. Things that very much make him want to kiss her, whether they're walking through the Nexus or standing atop a glacier on Voeld. And while the crew knows - it's a small ship - they are attempting to keep this private.

From the hot, intense look on Liam's face - he's thinking the same thing.

Ryder blinks, tucks her hair behind her ear, and looks at them with a raised eyebrow. "You guys are thinking about how my ass looks in armor, aren't you?"

"It _is_ a fantastic ass," Liam says with a smirk.

She playfully whacks him with one of her remaining pillows.

"I was specifically thinking of how your ass looks _out_ of armor," Jaal says. _Honesty is the best policy_ , a human idiom.

Her cheeks flush pink, and she swallows. She tilts her head in the curious half-focused way she does when SAM's said something on their private channel.

(Jaal often wishes he could hear their private channel: it's unnerving how Ryder seems to disappear when the channel is active. But perhaps it's for the better that SAM keeps some things private; the AI is learning boundaries and tact, albeit slowly.

_Pathfinder, you now have fifty minutes before our arrival at Kadara. If you wish to have sexual relations with your partners, I would recommend utilizing your shower to maximize your remaining available time._

Yes. Definitely for the better that he can't hear SAM. The slightly-mortified expression on Ryder's face is enough.)

She straightens, and returns her full attention to the two of them. "While I'm sure the look on his face would be priceless, I'm not sure I want to explain to Tann that I'm late for our vidcall because I was late for my meeting with Sloane because my boyfriends complimented my ass and I jumped them. So, I love you - but please leave," she smiles.

"You got it." Liam rises up on his knees and kisses her once more. "Good luck with Sloane."

"Thanks." She kisses his cheek before he stands up out of bed to find his shirt.  

"Until tonight," Jaal promises. He cups her cheek and kisses her softly.

Jaal finds his shirt and pants before Liam finds his own shirt hidden behind the plants. Jaal furrows his brow \- there was no frenzied removal of clothing last night, both of them neatly folded their clothes and left them on the couch - but then there's a quiet, happy _chirrup_ noise from the hallway, and he understands. The pyjak has a talent for circumventing closed doors, and enjoys moving everyone's belongings around.

"Hey," she says.

In unison, they both turn to her. She's pulled on leggings and a tank top, but they're both tight enough that Jaal can - and does - run his eyes over every curve and muscle. She steps onto her yoga mat in the middle of the room, smirking.

Ryder turns around and, looking over her shoulder, wiggles her ass.

And then bends over, pressing her palms to the floor.

Jaal swallows.

"A preview," she teases, stepping her legs back into a deeper stretch.

Liam lets out a strangled groan. "I'm leaving before you actually kill me."

Jaal follows him, thanking the stars that he can stay in the tech lab all day, and not have to pretend that he isn't thinking about tonight.


End file.
